(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Help, i invented roku’s basilisk and now my remote control doesn’t work
You failed to participate in the design and manufacturing of the perfect remote, so now your TV is permanently locked to Duck Dynasty reruns
The ultra-rare IRL sneer in my mailbox:
The actual sneer is that they got $1M dollars from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to do the mail drops:
https://philanthropy.org/990/who-funds/862362127/techequity-action
Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls
https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
“AI is gonna kill us all guys!”
Looks inside
Using AI to make sexual fantasies about catgirls
do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???
This is his rationale:
(For the otherwise confused, I do not advocate that people individually refuse to avail themselves of pre-superintelligent AI or AGI. Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage; because the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real; and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. I would give it all up in a heartbeat if there were an effective and collective treaty to stop it all at once. Don’t be the “Yet you participate in the system. Curious!” meme.)
And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!
I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap)
Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all…
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?
He’s hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed
“now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap is real
I’m baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.
Because AI is not a linear system where slightly less input results in slightly less damage
So I’m assuming this means “well less people using AI doesn’t mean less damage overall done”, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.
and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there.
you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer’s “logic” is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)
It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.
I’m pretty sure this is also just thinly veiled Rising of the Shield Hero fanfic??
fuck man do they even make normal perverts anymore?
Oh my god, he’s doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Don’t Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy
Six AI-editing tips, and not one is “don’t”.
Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.
Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.
Rationalism really is just Scientology with a guy who wants to be a harem anime protagonist instead of an admiral.
Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.
(“RMN” = “Red Means No” = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)
EDIT: He elaborates.
Way back in 2008 someone proposed a “project” where women at sci-fi conventions would wear pins indicating whether they were open to random strangers asking them if they could grope them. This caused much angry commentary and suggestions of a “swift kick to the balls” project. That disaster was still…still…somehow more consent conscious than what the Rationalists are doing
That fucking tweet about how “SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren’t scared of men” is so evil. The implication is that if women criticize an event where women are sexually assaulted and harassed, they are sabotaging an event whose mission is to stop men from
hatingcough being scared of women, and thus it’s their fault if sexism persists. It’s genuinely so evil. That’s all I can sayCishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.
The author Wentworth was just awarded half a million dollars by Jaan Tallinn & Dustin Moskovitz to do “research” at Lightcone Infrastructure. I am going to sign out because I am starting to get thoughts which involve the RCAF and 500-pound bombs (so of course they use the middle school across the street as human shields). Rapists, apologists for racists, and protectors of rapists are the enemies of all mankind.
How much of their budget goes towards registering under a novelty TLD?
Also, is ‘MM’ supposed to mean something other than megamega or megamillion? I genuinely can’t work out why you wouldn’t stop at a single M.
I forget which convention it is exactly, but I think it’s the one that goes M(ille), MM(illion) instead of Kilo, Mega…
Roman numerals had MM for million (there was also a convention with writing lines over your numbers).
Is this some fascist RETVRN nonsense then? 🤔
Neoclassicism has been big in the finance industry since the 19trh century to hide that high finance is just arithmetic and personal relationships like buying insurance. A used car dealer can’t afford Ionic columns and a marble desktop, but an investment bank can.
They get some replies
… … I’m writing this mostly because I’m finding it horrifying that it appears the LessWrong consensus reality is treating “nonconsent” stuff as a cornerstone of how it views women. This somehow seems to increasingly to be the case, seems wrong to me, and contributes to the erasure of some things I consider important.
Didn’t one of Aella’s “studies” into women’s sexuality turn up results that quite a lot of women surveyed had fantasies about being in a submissive role in a relationship or sexual encounter, up to and including aggression? Rationalists would naturally recycle that kind of subjective, context-free nugget of information into proof that most women want men to be dominant and aggressive in real-life flirting or sex. So it follows that it’s fine to approach women this way (though somehow they’re usually approaching leople with less power than them, not say, their boss or their boss’s wife). And if they treat a woman this way and she doesn’t like it then they convince themselves that they still didn’t do anything wrong because they had good reason to believe she would like it. They might even think that she’s just pretending she doesn’t like being spoken to or treated that way because she’s been taught it’s disrespectful.
Some people are into the idea of being so attractive it overpowers others’ self-control. Or, they like to imagine freedom from responsibility—mentally placing themselves in a situation where they cannot be judged for lustfulness. Or both. And hey, no condemnation here.
The idea of a fantasy seems to be too much for Rationalist big brains to handle. I’m sure it can’t be a motivated failure of comprehension, not at all… /s
I think many hardened kinksters, who have participated in or made the gear for things I can’t imagine, would have questions about Aella’s parties as described. So its not just those normies are just mindless NPCs following scripts.
John Wentsworth featured in the retracted S.E. Gyges essay.
I hope that anyone who has been assaulted or abused in these spaces finds support and justice.
oh gods ew that elaboration. euuughh
An Effective Altruist software developer who wrote about Bay Area EA’s culture of sexually aggressive men and misogyny explained that its hard to give informed consent when you are also being pushed to use alcohol and psychedelics. Most of us learned that when we were teenagers, but not these self-identified Big Brains (added to LessWrong’s Psychedelic Phase: Perigee). I do not know what to to other than pass on these stories and advise everyone I know to avoid any group connected to our friends.
uncovered downside risk
This is a novel and interesting way to euphemise rape, and because it’s an EA I can’t even tell if it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek.
EA/rationalism and redpill fit like yin and yang. Akin to how EA is an optimization of altruism with “suboptimal” human tendencies like morality and empathy stripped from it, red pill is an optimized sexual strategy with the humanity of women stripped from it.
Really well said.
Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it and they should fix this bug with some introspection
sigh
uncovered downside risk
This really is a cute bit of euphemism that deserves a bit more attention. Surely, it’s not problematic to apply finance jargon to human relationships! Let me just pop open Robinhood and cover my downside risk by buying a few put contracts on sexual assault.
Despite this culture, EA as a philosophy has a lot of good in it
OK, Ms. Gopalakrishnan, here’s an alternative perspective: EA is the application of affluent Anglo-American technocrats’ consumerism to charitable giving and virtue signaling. The “rational” aspect of EA is applying the same sort of stat-sheet logic to charity that the moneyed EAs use to shop for sports cars. SImilarly, the sexual attitudes we’re disputing here are extensions of that same consumerism! They are treating womens’ bodies and lives as consumer goods to be exploited and discarded. EA does not empower the less fortunate it claims to help, EA men will not ever empower or hold safe the women they objectify. These attitudes are one and the same.
From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA.
OK, that’s more than bad enough. Surely the next sentence will not escalate—
Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast
What the absolute hell? A no is a no and should not need to be “replenished”.
deleted by creator
Protos: Trump’s AI name change sparks insider domain trading claims
surprise level: zero
someone stop me before I petition Lobste.rs to rename the “vibecoding” tag to “si”
Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that don’t really work.
Meanwhile the people whose minds have been swiss cheesed by AI insist that this is because the code the LLMs write is hyper-efficient and TOO GOOD for us to read. These motherfuckers “solved” the code not working out of the box problem by strapping “a species-ending quantity of carbon emissions” worth of guess and check on top, tuned out, and when they look again they think they made a god that’s too powerful to understand, rather than a burst dam of dogshit that defies all understanding with its breathtakingly relentless volume of dogshit.
Timnit Gebru gets the Right Livelihood award this year
https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/
“For challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”
I got this via Dagens Nyheter, the premiere broadsheet here in Sweden which calls the award “the alternative Nobel Prize” because it’s Sweden and we need a standard to compare to.
Let’s see what the rats think of it. Yet another example of p0Lar1z@tion
Premium-quality sneer ran across my eyes recently: All A.I. Projects Are Digital Asbestos
Not sure if this was posted here before: TL;DR: almost all the “AI can make bioweapons” literature comes ultimately from the Effective Altruists
Ahhh yes, my old friend, the uh, dia-, um, what was it again, oh, yeah, D’yer Mak’er back-to-the-future
tinfoil hat time:
I am reminded of reading how some rationalists argued for using bioweapons on “unaligned” frontier ai researchers, and also how the fbi has raided illegal suburban biolabs recently recently, and anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re starting a biolab.
Probably completely unconnected, but something in the zeitgeist, at least.
Anthropic: AI MIGHT KILL US ALL WITH A BIOWEAPON
Also Anthropic: starts an AI-run bio lab. If it’s run to the same standards as the cybersecurity division I can’t imagine it’s going to be particularly well-supervised.
Do you want to get T-Virus? Because this feels like how you get T-Virus.
Well, we didn’t believe them that their AI can make deadly bioweapons when they already showed clear indisputable evidence
(the AI passing a biology multiple choice test), so clearly they need to have it make actual bioweapons so we’ll take the threat seriously!Edit: had a thought
T-Virus
I mean rationalists, particularly the e/acc breed, would probably count the T-virus as a success. After all, wasn’t Umbrella corporation able to study it and come up with some really powerful transhuman augmentation for their various leaders?
Just overlook the part where it turns you into an insane monster… I could easily envision someRationalist fanfic of Resident Evil portraying Umbrella corporation as misunderstood anti-heroes…
A former disciple says that Soryu Forall startted out wanting to exterminate humanity with a bioweapon and only pivoting to enlightening humanity later on. S.E. Gyges or his chatbot were speculating when they accused a specific Rationalist of dreaming of omnicide, but the idea is circulating in the milieu.
That post is login-protected, what does it say?
handy tip: all of skeeter is open, and you can bypass the login gate with eg skyview.social
Somebody tracked down things related to the ‘AI bioweapons’ stuff and a lot of them are financed by EA/related orgs apparantly. There is a preprint: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/aixbio_one.pdf
“We tracked the space financially, intellectually, and individually. Financially, 70% of the literature that disclosed funding was directly supported by EA orgs; 71% of the literature that didn’t disclose funding featured authors from funded orgs. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.”
What We Tell AI, a project collecting anonymous confessions about people’s AI use. Project was created by Synthetic Wisdom, a “emerging practice” dedicated to “public sense-making” about AI. It’s not clear who’s funding them (or if anyone is). The confessions are interesting even if I’m a little skeptical of the framing (chatbot use might be ubiquitous but it’s not inevitable).
this is literally just so they look busy with upcoming midterms
Weaksauce but also the AI companies wanted regulatory capture and open weights models to be banned so this will have probably annoyed them somewhat
Over the past two years, having the food companies regulate themselves has not worked out.
Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.
For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.
Ed: So far the only retort from the AI boosters appears to be “2025 doesn’t matter” and I’m not kidding
I’m sure the leaked rumors of Anthropic’s EBBT in 2026 (Earnings Before Bad Things) mean that Anthropic has turned things around and made such an amazing amount of money that they’ve delayed their IPO twice.
SimonW popping up proving Ed’s very point in the replies… 😅😂
Surprised he didn’t suggest that the valuation should be based on the quality of pelicans on bicycles that their models can draw
I’m stealing EBBT for these conversations. Much easier to follow than “TNR (technically not revenue)”.
I read somewhere that EBITA really means “Earnings before I tricked the dumb auditor”.
I’m sure Dan Luu will be issuing an apology to Zitron any minute now right?
new Odium Symposium. we look at Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel, and discuss the weaponization of antisemitism and the self-importance of writing a book of twitter screenshots. https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/25-y-word-170681755 or any podcast app
corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ
I’m a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that’s not important right now.
He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that’s smarter than any monkey you’ve ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.
Cheaper than humans.
Get rid of the humans.
You don’t need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They’re expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.
Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.
We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey’s shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.
Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I’m about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.
The monkey is here to stay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if you don’t get used to monkey poop consequences you’ll be left behind
If we breed enough monkeys we will colonize the stars and make everyone computer!
Uhh actually have you considered that we will need to solve monkey alignment first? Checkmate, adjust your priors
Clint Eastwood famously demonstrated optimal orangutan/human alignment in the hit 1978 film “Every Which Way But Loose.” Right turn, Clyde!
I’m ape/acc my ape(doom) is low, no need to fear Roko’s banana!
